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It's just that I've been hearing that democrats are taking your guns for longer than I've been voting and they still haven't.

Beto won't be able to either.

If there was ever a chance of sneaking it in on the sly, through detailed, expansive legislation such as this, S.66 - Assault Weapons Ban of 2019, that chance is gone now, shot down by Beto's emotional demagoguery.

He put it on the record: Hell yes, we're going to take your [guns] . . . .

(Who is "we" by the way?)

The audience was happy to cheer the idea. I've heard it was the loudest applause reaction of the evening. I suspect a fair share of those cheering wonder why these guns all come from Arkansas—I couldn't explain it —but what triggered the reaction were Beto's first words, quoted above.

Beto's was as ill-thought out an idea as "reparations," but crowds are not known for thinking carefully before reacting. This one reminded me of another one chanting "Send her back!"

Last edited by Newman; Friday, September 13th, 2019 at 9:54 PM.

“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.... We really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” —Saikat Chakrabarti, then AOC's Chief of Staff, explaining the Green New Deal for the hard of hearing.

"We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them." —CNN's Don Lemon, showing how to stop demonizing people.

...The Democrats have long contended their support of gun control laws does not mean they want to take away law-abiding citizens’ firearms. But on Friday, they struggled to square that message with their presidential contender’s full-throated call on national TV for confiscating assault rifles.

“I frankly think that that clip will be played for years at Second Amendment rallies with organizations that try to scare people by saying Democrats are coming for your guns,” Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware told CNN Friday. “I don’t think a majority of the Senate or the country is going to embrace mandatory buybacks. We need to focus on what we can get done.”

One worry among Democrats is that calling for outright confiscation plays into claims by Trump and other Republicans that Democrats are coming for people’s firearms.

On Thursday night, just as O’Rourke made his call to take back the rifles, Trump warned at a Republican retreat in Baltimore: “Democrats want to confiscate guns from law-abiding Americans, so they are totally defenseless when somebody walks into their house.”

Republicans, Trump promised, “will forever uphold the fundamental right to keep and bear arms.” That line got huge applause at the GOP retreat, and again Friday when it was repeated there by Vice President Mike Pence.

By all accounts, Trump needs to run up the score in rural areas to win reelection next year. The 2020 outcome is expected to depend heavily on a trio of Rust Belt states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — that have large numbers of rural voters, many of whom are gun-owners or sympathetic to owners on this issue. And Democrats’ hope of winning control of the Senate rests on states with high rates of gun ownership, like Arizona and Texas.

The report goes on to say the same thing different ways by different people. But writing off Beto as publicity hungry is easier said than done:

Indeed, O’Rourke isn’t alone. None of the other nine candidates on the debate stage contradicted him on his proposal to require owners of the two popular styles of assault rifles to sell them to the government. Two candidates — New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and California Sen. Kamala Harris — have also called for mandatory buybacks of assault weapons. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, asked if she agreed with O’Rourke Thursday night, allowed only that she preferred a voluntary buyback to a mandatory one.

All 10 of the Democrats on stage have called for an assault weapon sales ban, the latest sign of how the party has become emboldened on gun control.

And finally:

O’Rourke’s remarks worry Democrats like Warren Varley, who lost a race for a state legislative seat in Iowa last year.

“The lines like, ‘We’re gonna come and take your AR-15,’ just plays into the fears that the NRA has been stoking, and a proposal like that is just going to make rural Iowa and I think probably rural areas elsewhere more red,” Varley said. “I think that’s just a bridge too far for most rural folks, and it conjures up images of the government coming in and invading your home and images of big government trampling over the rights of individuals.”

Maybe it "conjures up" such images because that's what it is.

“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.... We really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” —Saikat Chakrabarti, then AOC's Chief of Staff, explaining the Green New Deal for the hard of hearing.

"We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them." —CNN's Don Lemon, showing how to stop demonizing people.